Dead to the Core: An Acoustic Celebration of the Grateful Dead
Featuring Jeffrey Pepper Rodgers, Jefferson Hamer, Steve Roy, and Wendy Sassafras Ramsay

Dead to the Core is a collective of singer-songwriters and acoustic musicians, led by musician/author Jeffrey Pepper Rodgers, with a shared love of the Grateful Dead. In intimate concerts, the musicians celebrate the band’s music not through note-for-note re-creations but by playing the songs their own way—letting them grow and evolve collaboratively in the true spirit of the Dead.

Interspersed with the music are clips from Rodgers’ own interviews with Jerry Garcia and Bob Weir, in which they reflect on the roots and evolution of the music.

A Dead to the Core show is an experience unlike any other Grateful Dead tribute: a night of deeply personal performances that illuminate the masterful song craft of one of America’s most original bands. Grateful Dead music right down to the core.

“Rodgers doesn’t tap the legion of dedicated Grateful Dead tribute artists for these concerts…. Instead, he seeks out songwriters and musicians who have developed their own voices and styles, though they are very much inspired by—and fans of—Garcia and the Dead.”—Arts Fuse

Jeffrey Pepper Rodgers is a grand prize winner of the John Lennon Songwriting Contest, founding editor of Acoustic Guitar magazine, and author of a best-selling video series teaching his acoustic arrangements of classic Grateful Dead songs.

“Jeffrey Pepper Rodgers sure can play the music—listen to his ‘Stella Blue’ and you’ll know what I mean. Better still, he can teach it.”
—Dennis McNally, author, A Long Strange Trip: The Inside History of the Grateful Dead

Jefferson Hamer is an internationally touring songwriter, guitarist, and traditional musician based in Brooklyn. He performs with the Murphy Beds and Session Americana, and his guitar work and vocals are featured on Sarah Jarosz’s Grammy-nominated Blue Heron Suite. Hamer’s Child Ballads album with Anaïs Mitchell earned a BBC2 Folk Award and was named one of NPR’s top-ten folk releases of the year.

Steve Roy is a multi-instrumentalist from Eliot, Maine, who plays upright bass, mandolin, fiddle, guitar, and ukulele. He performs with Oldhat String Band and, as a sideman, has toured internationally with many of the acoustic world’s top acts, including Laurie Lewis and Tom Rozum, John Reischman and Eli West, Molly Tuttle, Joe K. Walsh, Frank Solivan and Dirty Kitchen, Joy Kills Sorrow, and many others.

Wendy Sassafras Ramsay, Rodgers’ bandmate and duo partner (as Pepper and Sassafras), is a singer-songwriter and versatile multi-instrumentalist on clarinet, flute, accordion, and guitar. She also plays in the alternative rock band Starting Off Red.